PROGRESS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN SCOTLAND. HERE are many signs that the old and hard crust which so rapidly breaking up. The catastrophe was foreseen indeed more than twenty years ago by those who had any real interest in religious thought, and any eyes to see beneath the surface of those conventional watchwords which, like superstitions, last and even exercise an influence long after they have ceased to have any life. To all who could trace the deeper mind of the country it was evident that the wave of dogmatic enthusiasm which culminated in what is known as the Disruption had also spent itself in the very excess of its onrush, and that a new era was preparing. From the first there was much that was shallow and factitious in the outburst of dogmatism which preceded 1843; and before then the reaction had already set in amongst the better and more cultivated youth at the Universities. The men who rose to any prominence in the Established Church during the next few years were all men of a different stamp from those of the preceding decade; while such leaders as survived in the Divinity Halls or elsewhere-men like Dr. Robert Lee or Dr. James Robertson-helped to give an impetus to an entirely new line of thought and interest. The services of Dr. Lee in promoting the cause of liberal Christian thought in Scotland are amply deserving of acknowledgment; and Dr. Story's volumes contain an abundant record of them.* When he wrote in his diary, on the eve of his commencing * Life and Remains of Robert Lee, D.D. 1870. his work as Professor of Biblical Criticism in Edinburgh (Nov., 1847), that his great object would be "to free" the students "from superstition, fanaticism, and bigotry, and to instil into their minds principles of true wisdom, piety, and charity," he indicated clearly enough the changed spirit which was beginning in the country, and which he lived to do so much to advance. His directness, rationality, and clear good sense were the main weapons with which Dr. Lee assailed the prevalent bigotries and sectarianisms which had so deteriorated the social and intellectual atmosphere of his time. He was himself a genuine and growing liberal, as the recent volume of his sermons shows; he had a vivid, at times painfully vivid, apprehension of the gravity of the questions which were coming up for discussion in every department of theological and scientific knowledge. But beyond the vigour and brightness of mind which he brought to bear on some of these questions, he cannot be said to have deepened the channels of religious thought. He rather helped to clear away the rubbish from the old paths than to open up new paths of inquiry. His mind was critical, incisive, polemical, rather than historical or speculative. He could fight well—no man ever fought better. He could cleverly expose the traditional nonsense which has so often passed in Scotland for sacred dogma. No man ever pricked with a lighter or more effective stroke the pretensions of hyper-orthodoxy. But he lacked sympathy with forms of theological culture different from his own; nor had he the deeper intelligence which sees through the decay of systems the onward working of principles destined to better and more comprehensive constructions in the future. The name of Dr. James Robertson, who was Dr. Lee's colleague as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Edinburgh, has been comparatively little associated with the advance of a more liberal Christian culture in Scotland. His practical labours in connection with what is known as the Endowment Scheme, and the extension of the Church of Scotland in the towns and mining districts, have almost entirely eclipsed his labours as a theological professor; nor can we say very definitely what his influence was in this respect; but there can be no doubt of the fact that he himself was really liberal in all his deepest convictions, and in the tendency of his speculations. He was naturally largeminded, and he had a genuine, although obscure, vein of speculation. He was lacking, however, in all grace and point of expression. His speech was barely articulate to a literary ear; the heavy involutions of his written periods being as harsh to the reader as the guttural tones of his Aberdonian voice to the hearer. He has left nothing, therefore, that can give any idea of the power of thought which he really possessed, and still less of the wider views of Christian philosophy that were opening before his mind in his last years. Yet his influence was elevating, both as a teacher and worker; and he gave definite assistance in carrying the mind of the Scottish Church beyond the narrow rut of "evangelical" and ecclesiastical tradition in which it had been so long labouring. If not a German scholar himself, he had something of the tendencies of German thought, and had a powerful sympathy with some of these tendencies. His intellectual aspirations were ideal, and no one who knew him or conversed with him in his philosophic moments (which were unhappily rare, amidst the exacting labours of his role as an ecclesiastical leader) but must have felt how far he was capable of transcending that dead traditionalism the echoes of which were still heard in his sermons or lectures. But the main influences which were educating the youthful Scottish mind in the decade of years which followed the Secession of 1843, were to a large extent outside both the Universities and the Church. They were partly literary and partly speculative. The older life of thought descending from Coleridge and the Hares, and the newer springs of culture which had risen in England with the school of Maurice and Kingsley, and, more than either, the study of German theology in its speculative, critical, and historical developments, were amongst the most powerful of these influences. And if we add to these the enthusiasm for the writings of Carlyle, and the quiet, comparatively unnoticed effects which had come from Mr. Erskine's religious books-diligently scouted and abused by the religious press at the time of their publication—we shall have probably brought into view the chief causes which were operating beneath the surface towards a determinate change in the theological opinion of Scotland. That there were no marked signs of this change as yet may be readily granted. Nay, when we turn to look at the obvious religious phenomena of the country during those busy years when the Free Church was building up its ecclesiastical system, and such names as those of Dr. Candlish, Dr. Cunningham, and Dr. Guthrie carried the din of its ecclesiastical and theological activity over the world, it may seem as if it were a paradox to speak of any progressive vein underlying its still dominant orthodoxies. No one certainly will accuse the Free Church during these years of betraying the doctrines of the Covenant, or of not flaunting the old banner in the breeze produced by their own agitations. All seemed, in Free Church pulpit and probably in Free Church hall, not only orthodox, but hyper-orthodox. It was then, and long * No one who has read Dr. Robertson's Life by one of his pupils-Dr. Charteris— especially a letter in the Appendix on Bunsen's "Hippolytus," can doubt his aspirations in the direction of a higher Christian philosophy. afterwards, the role of the Free Church to play against the Establishment, and even against the United Presbyterians,* the part of defenders of the pure confessional faith of Scotland, for which the martyrs of the seventeenth century had perished, and the Church had witnessed in its purest days. Our space would fail to tell one tithe of all that was constantly repeated on this subject, to the disparagement of the "Moderates," who alone were alleged to have remained as a miserable residuum† in the Established Church, or the Voluntaries who had compromised their soundness by countenancing, if not adopting, liberal views on the Atonement. These were the palmy days of Free Church orthodoxy, when Dr. Cunningham was the chief, as he was the ablest, representative of doctrinal opinion in the body; and Dr. Candlish adventured as far south as London to deliver the English mind from the snares which Mr. Maurice had woven for it in his "Theological Essays." No one who knows anything of the writings of these men, apart from their work as ecclesiastical politicians, can doubt their eminent ability. Different in many respects, they were alike in their genuine power of mental grasp. What they saw they saw clearly, and maintained hardily with a firm and forcible logic. They were both masters of argumentative fence in a high degree, although in very contrasted ways. There were no minds of their time to whose encounter they were unequal in point of mere vigour, dexterity, and masterliness within their range. This range, it may be said, was limited, and I am not prepared to dispute the assertion. It is none the less true that there were few minds in England, with all its comparative richness of culture and of learning, that could have been pitted against either the massive force of Cunningham or the adroit subtlety of Candlish. Both men well deserved their position as leaders in the Free Church while they lived, and Scotland, whatever many may think of their enlightenment and the character of their work as a whole, has reason to be proud of their intellect. Anywhere they would have been true leaders of men by their mental stature alone. It is unnecessary that I should do more than indicate the theological attitude of these men. They were representatives of the "straitest sect" of Scotch orthodoxy-the genuine descendants, as they were the admirers, of Dr. Andrew Thomson, rather than of Dr. Chalmers. The latter stood in many respects alone in the Free Church, while nominally its most distinguished leader in the eyes of the English and American world. He was a man of different The large body of Presbyterians formed in 1847 by the coalition of the Secession and Relief Churches which had left the Church of Scotland in the previous century. +"Residuaries" was a common appellation applied to those who remained in the National Church in 1843. type altogether, no mere Churchman, theologian, or preacher, great as he was in all these respects,-but a man of genius whose measure we have no call now to take. He had in fact passed away from the scene early in 1847, just as the new movement was beginning, yet not without a prescient glance towards it, half of warning and half of encouragement, in his famous review of Morell's "History of Speculative Philosophy." But Dr. Cunningham and Dr. Candlish were the real representatives of Free Church theology. They spoke its true unmixed voice when they sent forth warnings, the one against "the objectionable and dangerous views in regard to the theology of the Reformers," which had been ventilated by a young theologian in the Established Church, and the other against the "direction" in which "English theology appeared in certain quarters to be running." It requires a very slight acquaintance with the writings of both to recall the obstinate determination with which they entrenched themselves within the old confessional barriers of the Scottish faith, and sent their words of menace after all who showed any tendency towards what they styled "a low and unsound doctrinal theology,”‡ especially if the habitat of this theology was found within the Established Church. It is true that Dr. Candlish lived to neologize in his own behalf. With all his incisive dogmatism and the crudeness of many of his traditional views, especially regarding Scripture and Revelation,§ his mind was far too quick and active not to detect the weakness of the popular theology in some of its aspects, and far too subtle and ingenious in its activities not to essay to give it a deeper spiritual and logical basis. This he tried, in the ablest and best of his theological writings-a volume of Lectures on the "Fatherhood of God," marked by the best qualities of his mind and by many happy strokes both of style and of argument -yet far from being, as it has been styled, a great work in speculative theology. It is acute and subtle in a high degree, and thoughtful up to a certain point, but greatly deficient both in breadth of spiritual insight, and in historical and philosophical comprehension. Nothing indeed can be less fruitful than many of its wire-drawn logicalities as to matters removed from the sphere of rational theology altogether. As it was, however, it roused the suspicion of heresy, or at least of novelty, which in theological perception is almost as bad, and by a strange turn of events, destined not to be without its parallel in more recent times, called forth a champion of orthodoxy from the ranks of the Established Church. The spectacle was edifying in the highest degree to * Dr. Cunningham's Reformers and Theology of the Reformation, p. 8. |